


midwif

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Childbirth, Gen, Gore, Horror, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 02:52:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4083844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's delivered hundreds--backwards babies, twisted cords, torn bodies, blood, urine, shit, sweat--she's seen it all. Until Eve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	midwif

She's barefoot.

 

Alice knows without asking exactly how far along the girl is, and says so as soon as she's climbed up onto the examination table, her short bare legs dangling beneath the heavy globe of her swollen womb.

 

“Nearly forty weeks, are we?” Alice says, lifting a pencilled eyebrow and a smile, leaning down to make a note in her chart. “Nearly there.”

 

The girl smiles. Her voice is surprisingly deep, throaty. “Nearly.”

 

Alice also knows, without asking, that this girl is homeless. Her bare feet are caked along the bottom with soot and pieces of gravel, her white dress singed and dirty at the hems; her black hair is lank in her face, her eyes set deep in her skull.

 

Alice lets her gaze drift as subtly as possible up the lily-white crooks of the girl's arms, looking for track marks—none. That's good.

 

“Have you been seeing an obstetrician?” Privately, Alice doubts it. She looks as if she's walked straight from the trainyard on the east side of town, and perhaps she has.

 

“Oh, no,” says the girl.

 

Alice pauses—leans back on her stool. Looks the filthy trodden girl up and down, from her faraway eyes to her cracked feet, and back again to the protruding mass of her stomach. She can imagine the silvery stretch marks. The girl can't be more than nineteen.

 

“Is this your first pregnancy?”

 

The girl gives her a dreamy close-lipped smile, and doesn't answer. Her hand rolls down over her belly in a long arc with the protective grace of a woman who's borne and borne again a thousand times.

 

Alice clears her throat and bends down to her chart again.

 

“And you would like—” She flips the yellow carbon paper, squinting at the nurse's scrambled handwriting. “A home birth?”

 

“A water birth,” says the girl.

 

Alice stares at her.

 

“But you haven't seen an obstetrician. Any prenatal care at all? Is the father in the picture?”

 

“I want a midwife,” says the girl, in a clear voice. “I don't believe in giving birth without one.”

 

“I'm sorry—”

 

“I want a midwife,” the girl says again. “I want a water birth. Can you do that for me? Or should I look elsewhere?”

 

Alice stares a bit longer, then lets her pen rest on the girl's chart. She braces her hands on her knees and looks at her hard. The girl looks right back, with half a smile on her mouth. It's a cruel mouth, somehow.

 

Alice knows, in the back of her head, that this girl won't get the sort of help she needs in any ER, any Planned Parenthood—she's days away from labour. No one will take her. Without the clinic she'll give birth on the street and the baby will die. She can see it playing out along the asphalt as clear as day. She takes a deep breath, thinks of the mortgage on her house, knows she won't see a cent for this, but—

 

“I'm sorry,” she says, at a loss for how else to begin the acquaintance, “the nurse didn't take down your name.”

 

“Eve,” says the girl, and smiles with her soot-blackened teeth.

* * *

 

She's known as long as she could know anything that she wanted to be a midwife. Dove in headfirst the day after she earned her stripes as an RN. She's birthed hundreds, all of them safely caught in her capable hands—backwards babies, twisted cords, torn bodies, blood, urine, shit, sweat—she's seen it all; she's forty-five and never done a better day's work, she thinks, than she has here at the clinic on Fifth, where the women from the projects waddle in to her, desperate and broke, terrified of hospitals, desperate for another woman's presence in their time of need. She's the only midwife in the Midwest who does what she does for free, or so she's been told. She's tough, she's proud. She's seen it all, or at least she thinks she has, until Eve gives her the address for her delivery.

 

It turns out that Eve doesn't want a home birth so much as a motel birth.

 

The girl is waiting for her on the concrete steps of the Motel 6, holding her massive belly in her arms.

 

It's two weeks since their first meeting at the clinic and Alice has been trying to place what is wrong with Eve every day since. It isn't the pregnancy—she checked and checked again. It's something else about her, some depth in her face that is unnerving, something about the tightness in the knuckles of her hands. She doesn't walk like a pregnant woman. She walks like a queen.

 

“Eve—dear, I really do have to recommend a hospital birth,” Alice says, helplessly, by way of greeting, looking up as Eve makes her easy way up the stairs. She makes a mental note of the distance to St Cecilia's, thinks about putting 911 on speed dial.

 

Eve ignores her, or doesn't hear her.

 

“It's nearly time,” is what she says, waiting patiently by the door to her room as Alice catches up. She's never seen a pregnant girl move so fast. “My contractions started last night.”

 

“Good,” says Alice, out of breath, “good.” It isn't good; there are cobwebs on the railings, and this whole place smells like bleach. But she has a feeling that no matter how much she insists, Eve won't be climbing into her car and turning around and heading to the hospital. She almost hopes that something will go wrong, something to prompt her to call for help. But she's healthy as a horse, walking into her bare, vile-smelling motel room, the globe of her womb in her arms, and there's not much Alice can do until that changes.

 

Thank God, the bathtub is pristine, and will do as a birth tub. Alice can see streaks where Eve's fingers rested, can imagine her kneeling, carefully wiping the sides and rims, humming, distracting herself as her body shifts and opens.

 

Eve is staring at her.

 

Alice clears her throat. “This will do. Though I really have to insist—”

 

“No,” says Eve. Her voice cuts through the bathroom like a knife and Alice feels inexplicably afraid of this girl six inches shorter than her and half a world younger. “I am going into the other room. My water will break soon.” She says it as if she can predict it to a certainty. It's unnerving.

 

She turns, like a toy ballerina, on her sooty heel, and leaves the bathroom, her head cocked to the side, her dreamy hands stroking up and down the belly beneath her stretched white dress, and Alice stares after her, namelessly afraid.

 

She wants to leave. She realises in the same instant that she doesn't think she will be able to.

* * *

 

Alice sets up in the bathroom, listening to the staticky hum of the motel TV outside. In the mirror she can see Eve, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching without blinking. With every breath her belly swells beneath her breasts and she rubs it, softly, as if hushing it.

 

The more Alice kneels on the hard tile floor in the smell of bleach the more the fear builds up in the base of her spine. Why be afraid? she thinks. Eve is tiny, tiny and swollen, heavy with child, and no more dangerous than a housefly; yet Alice has the distinct feeling of danger, and cannot be sure that Eve's eyes don't slip in her direction to stare when she turns her back.

 

“How are your contractions, dear?” she calls out, after a few hours, all set up but unwilling to enter the room with the girl. The endearment stings in her mouth.

 

Eve is silent for a moment, and then calls back, “Much longer now.”

 

It makes her feel as if she's stepping through an electric field, entering that room, but she has to, so Alice goes; she steps in front of the growling TV and asks Eve to lie back, to see the dilation of her cervix.

* * *

 

Her water breaks at four PM. She's in active labour by six. Yet her breathing is slow and regular, and Alice has never seen a woman so calm so close to transition. She sits on the other queen bed while Eve stares at the TV, the front of her dress wet, humming to her pregnant stomach.

 

Alice reminds her to move. But this is somehow worse, more unnerving—Eve rounding the room in a slow winding route, stepping to an unheard beat in her head. Even when her back is turned to Alice Alice can feel her eyes on the back of her skull.

 

It's too late to back out now.

 

She asks again and again if Eve needs anything. Medication, massage. But Eve ignores her; she seems almost entranced, staring down at her massive womb, her eyes dreamy and far back. At nine o'clock she pauses in the corner to lift her dress above her head and resume her walking, naked, now, her dark-nippled breasts swollen with milk, her dark pubic hair a neat triangle beneath her belly.

 

Alice swallows, thumbing the buttons on her phone. Nothing about this is right.

* * *

 

Near ten o'clock Eve moves into the bathroom of her own accord. Alice hears the water begin to run and follows after.

 

She's standing, watching the water gather in the yellowed tub. Alice reaches out to touch the dimples in her naked back, thinking of pelvic bones separating and pain in the lower back, but Eve turns her head and her sharp eyes to her and she snatches her hand away again as if she has been stung.

 

A trickle of blood runs down Eve's leg.

* * *

 

At eleven Alice begins to wonder why the girl wanted a midwife at all.

 

She hasn't asked a single question, hasn't needed a single word of advice or comfort—has simply wandered the room, breathing through what must have been minute-long contractions without a hint of pain, and now she is sitting patiently in the warm water, her legs open, running her fingers over the stretched skin of her belly. She's fully dilated—pushing without being told—her head is leaning back against the edge of the tub, her eyes fluttered closed, as if she's in some kind of ecstasy instead of the worst pain of her young life.

 

Nonetheless, this is her job—Alice kneels next to the tub, her hands freshly washed, waiting for something to happen, murmuring rote encouraging words whenever she can remember to, whenever she can shake off the unease long enough to remember that she is working. Eve seems neither to need them nor to care for them.

 

“This can't be your first,” Alice says, eventually, reaching out with a shaking hand to push Eve's hair from her face. “You're old hat at this.” She tries to laugh, tries to engage, but Eve only smiles with her cruel mouth, her pale eyelids still closed.

 

“It's not my first,” she says, the most she's spoken all night. “You're right. I am very old.”

 

Alice laughs, until the words snag in her ears; and then she sinks a little toward the floor, confused.

 

“ _Old_ ,” she says, hesitantly, scoffing. “You're not old. How many have you had?” she continues, feeling a dread in her stomach. “I really should have gotten that information from—”

 

Eve's smile solidifies. Her eyes are still shut.

 

“I am very old, Alice, much older than you.”

 

This time Alice doesn't have a joke. Her hand goes limp in Eve's hair. In her peripheral vision she sees her naked belly twitching, rising out of the water.

 

Eve hums a contented noise.

 

“What do you mean by that, dear?” Alice says, trying to keep her voice level. She knew something was wrong, she knew. The girl is crazy, that's what. She begins to mentally replace women's shelters in her brain with the numbers for psych wards, CPS.

 

“I mean that I have many, many children, and I don't need a midwife, Alice.”

 

A rush of blood from between Eve's legs. Alice looks down, instinctively bends over to look for the crown of the head.

 

But there is no crown. Just the black space of Eve's vagina, wide open but empty.

 

“What—”

 

“I don't need a midwife, Alice. I've done this a thousand times before. And I do mean a thousand—”

 

Eve gives a great groan, and something slides out from her in the cloud of floating blood, so much blood that at first Alice cannot see it, though she plunges her hands into the water in case the child has slipped out, but she feels nothing—nothing except a strange fluttering in the water, in the blood.

 

Something sharp sears into her hand.

 

Alice sees it.

 

She screams, though she doesn't mean to, and falls back hard on the slippery tile floor, and Eve sits up, reaching her arms forward into the water, her hair falling in her face.

 

Alice scrambles to her feet, wringing her hands, flinging droplets of blood from the deep cut in the webbing of her thumb and forefinger across the wall, and looks at the bathtub—full of _worms—_ as thick around as slugs, tiny black pincers snapping blindly in the afterbirth, hundreds of them, all of them turning their blunt heads towards the girl called Eve, wriggling towards her, climbing up over her pubic bone, her inner thighs, squirming towards her milk-heavy breasts.

 

Eve's face is the picture of motherly love.

 

Alice pinches the inside of her own wrist, hard, hard enough to puncture and draw blood, feeling simultaneously that she is dreaming and that she is about to pass out. All she can do is stammer “What—what—what—what—” And Eve lets a few of the creatures coil around her wrist and lifts them from the water, bringing her arm across her chest, and the worms reach out with their shining black pincers, clamp onto her nipple, wriggling like hungry leeches hanging from her breast.

 

“I don't need a midwife, Alice,” says Eve, for the third time. She is looking at the worms that have come out of her as if they are the most precious newborn there has ever been. There are tears in her faraway eyes. The tub is turning red with blood. “I need a lab rat.”

 

It moves too fast for Alice to react. A long black worm that has landed on the tile floor, halfway up her leg before she can move to shake it off, working its way into her ear before she realises what is happening.

 

Eve is watching. She is frozen against the sink. She can hear the pincers snapping at her eardrum, gnawing through to her brain. She is paralysed, terrified. Six of them are hanging from Eve's breast, suckling hungrily, and more are climbing up her, covering her, blissful in their mother's presence, and the hearing in Alice's ear goes with a horrible  _pop_ in her head, and she feels the worm's slick body curling into the inside of her skull, and she can't move a muscle, and she's tough, she's proud, she knows she's going to die in this bathroom with this girl.

 

“Oh, thank you, Alice,” says Eve, smiling with soot-blackened teeth. “This is the happiest day of my life.”

 

 


End file.
